Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

Barence writes "It's desolate, dirty, and sex is outcast to a separate island. In this article, PC Pro's Barry Collins returns to Second Life to find out what went wrong, and why it's raking in more cash than ever before. It's a follow-up to a feature written three years ago, in which Collins spent a week living inside Second Life to see what the huge fuss at the time was all about. The difference three years can make is eye-opening."

Second Life had little point beyond being a sex simulator and roleplaying simulator. You can't really play a real game in there. There isn't any real combat Physics built into Second Life. You walk around, you chat, if you can buy stuff and sell stuff that looks cool. You can own housing that serves no purpose. Turning actual money into Lindens was a waste of money.

At least in WoW you could fight enemies and make money, it could be pointless because the mobs respawn, but you could do it.

When they made it to where no one under 18 who was verified (and their verification process was extremely intrusive and I know many people who just decided to stop using second life entirely over it. It involves basicaly forking over Credit Card information, in some cases a Birth Certificate, and yuor home address.) they killed SL. Second Life was the one MMO, however crude that you could have sex in.

Sex makes the world go around, when they stopped sex, they stopped the game in effect. A virtual world (sand box game) are a penny a thousand, the only difference is the fact you could of had sex with "other living people" in theirs.

I tried that a little a fair while back, (I was bored and in the end trying it did not fix that).I never came across any actual sex, but the yiffy section is certainly a damn sight more crowded than most of it (still most of them just stand around and do nothing, so pretty much like second life, except with even worse graphics and no money aspect).

..and their verification process was extremely intrusive and I know many people who just decided to stop using second life entirely over it. It involves basicaly forking over Credit Card information, in some cases a Birth Certificate, and yuor home address..

Totally wrong. Thanks to the relaxed privacy standards in the US of A, there's tons of readily available personal information in online databases that you can use to pass the age verification.

"It involves basicaly forking over Credit Card information, in some cases a Birth Certificate, and yuor home address.) "Let's not forget what stopped me from playing the game. After refusal to give up CC info, the only other way to verify was to give them my address and my SSN. No thanks, I'll push on to Blue Mars [bluemarsonline.com] to peddle my virtual warez.

It's been a looong time since I spent time in virtual worlds like these (remember Alphaworld?), but one of the things that I really liked was the scale of it all. Acre upon acre of elaborately constructed buildings and artwork - no people anywhere in sight, but so what? I liked it, in a "walking alone in the mountains" kind of way. Introverts need places to be, too.

For SL, if the kink has moved away to their own island, and left all the glorious monuments behind, I'm more attracted to it than ever! Never co

This is a lot like the old MUDs (text based multi-user environments). The free ones were split between gaming and social varieties. Modern MMORPGs resemble the old gaming MUDs, whereas Second Life resembles a social MUD.

I looked up the War of Jessie Wall and found that you mis-characterized it to justify your rant against liberals. Jessie was the zone where a bunch of players from WWII Online decided to set up shop, many of the players with a conservative bent. They weren't really interested in finding a spot and fitting in rather than carving out a section for themselves. You portray it more as "poor conservatives with pro-war views being harassed by the evil liberals". In the pieces I read, it seemed there were dicks on both sides of the fence who kept on ratcheting up the rhetoric. Jessie wasn't locked down because of views, it was locked down because LL didn't want player killing to spread beyond that zone.

You detect the non-objective viewpoint just from the word "pro-US". Apparently you can't be peace loving, anti-war, or liberal and like the US.

Though I have to object to the word "conservative" being used here. These aren't conservatives and they aren't really following conservative principles. Even neo-conservative doesn't really apply. "Jingoist" or "populist" would be more accurate.

So the hippie beatnik leftist commies asked them to stop continually shouting "USA XOXOXOXO LOLZ!!11!!!ONE!!11!!!", and because of that the crap was beaten out of their characters?
And then they complained?
Goddam dirty hippies. They should learn to fire guns, eat red meat and go to church.

Wow, that brings back memories. The last time I was on there, part of the wall was actually still standing. One of the few instances where SL had any sense of history (with the way they have land set up, often whole areas will simply disappear with no indication of what once stood there).

The first culture to display their nascent fascism were the liberal peacniks, who objected to ardent patriotism of a number of players during the Iraq war. They tried to bottle up and hem in the pro-US players, who reacted violently (within the rules of the Jesse zone, where killing was possible).

I seriously doubt it was unprovoked and from what I've read, the picture isn't painted quite the same way in the article. Excerpt from: "WAR OF THE JESSIE WALL" ( the link above )

Nothing doing: WWIIOLers swooped down on the Outlands, loaded for bear, and used its longtime residents for live target practice, killing them again and again, and maybe yet again. Because most Residents, unsurprisingly, set their home point on their home property, many folks living in the Outlands were stuck in an infinite cycle of violence, to be shot on their land then resurrected and shot again, in perpetuity, until they logged off the game entirely, or their antagonist finally got bored. All of which was perfectly permissible by Linden Lab since, after all, this is precisely what the Outlands were designed for.

Permitted or not, griefing sucks and corpse camping is the pinnacle of griefing in any MMO.

"Their originally-stated goal was laudable: a lassaiz-faire (sp?) world with basic physics, to see how people would operate"

I think they came to the end of that experiment and concluded that some people are assholes.

I think they came to the end of that experiment and concluded that some people are assholes.

And that should have been problem solved; make one "free-for-all" without killing for the nascent fascist liberal peacniks (yeah, you dirty peace-lover, yeah, you love peace don't you, you dirty peace-lover!) and make one "free-for-all" where the griefers can go and grieve eachother; that'll be fun.

The problem with griefers (like the WWIIOL'ers in our story) is that they only think griefing is fair when THEY do it. The story shows the WWIIOL'ers were little cry-babies when others started using similar tacti

In any society, a few people are sociopaths. They want to inflict harm on others for their own personal gain, and it makes no difference whether they are violent criminals or violent criminals who claim to kill people for "security" or "freedom."

In a proper civil society, sociopaths are separated from the rest of the population. Otherwise the people who are able to resolve their differences under the law are hamstrung by the juvenile minds who can't let go of their primitive impulses.

How do you intend to explain these "sociopaths" that intend to protect for freedom and security when they don't do their job and (insert your nationality) lives are lost?

If you're being drowned out by popular opinion and you start killing people, "freedom" and "security" are just nice words you're trying to use to justify your primitive nature. It's also a sign that your views don't have much intrinsic value if they can't convince people on merit alone.

I like your signature as well, it completely allows me to omit anything you say as valuable or valid.

You're mistaking my quote for your own biases and shortcomings as a critical thinker. Bravo!

The problem is that sociopaths exist in every society and nationality.

The reason every country needs an army is to protect that country from powerful sociopaths in other countries. I think you'll be pretty hard-pressed to name any single war that was started by a truely social (not socialist, just socially average) person.

If every person was as of "average" social behaviour, we wouldn't need armies or borders because "average" people don't start wars. I'm not talking about hippies or anything, just ask any

The difference between life and games is that games has rules. This is why people like them. There are trivially predictable outcomes from most situations. One can say that one is creating a laissez faire environment, but such a statement is at best naive. If a game is to function, rules still have to be entered, and as such will contain the assumptions of the people who write the rules. Since rules cannot be ignored, the rules themselves come attack, and changes get made to support the needs of the mo

Your facts have been checked, and found wanting. The real story is now there for all to see: conservative assholes moved into an area that didn't want them and started griefing the locals. The locals complained, and Linden did the right thing. Once again, when asshole conservatives aren't allowed to be bullies, they will whine about their 'freedom' being taken away.

Your facts have been checked, and found wanting. The real story is now there for all to see: [...] assholes moved into an area that didn't want them and started griefing the locals. The locals complained, and Linden did the right thing. Once again, when asshole[...]s aren't allowed to be bullies, they will whine about their 'freedom' being taken away.

Your sad attempt at propaganda fails.

Although I wholeheartedly agree with most of your remark, I have edited it to reflect a more objective view of reality.

No. You have edited it to be less objective. Removing a fact because you disagree with it or think things are more 'balanced' with its removal, is not objective. The griefers were conservatives. That is a fact. Why delete it?

Did these people present conservative ideologies and theories? I doubt it. I doubt they would have recognized political theories without shooting at it first. "Conservative" does not mean pro-war, pro-violence, anti-hippie, etc.

Did these people present conservative ideologies and theories? I doubt it. I doubt they would have recognized political theories without shooting at it first. "Conservative" does not mean pro-war, pro-violence, anti-hippie, etc.

Of course they presented conservative ideologies and theories. I wouldn't have said so unless it were true. RTFA.

Are you American? I understand that in the rest of the world, 'conservative' does not mean 'pro war, pro-violence, anti-hippy.' But here in the Land of the Free, it does. Oh sure, there are conservatives who do not espouse such things, even here. But they never speak up against those who do, so I lump them all together, the deathers, the birthers, the teabaggers: all the wacky conspiracy theorist

Too long a story to tell here (you can google it) but their originally-stated goal was laudable: a lassaiz-faire (sp?) world with basic physics, to see how people would operate, including a truly free-for all zone called Jesse.

So basically, just like every other time laissez-faire system have been set up, people acted true to their dickhead nature, and the system fell down in flames. Now if only the people running the economy would learn from this, and stop pushing the destructive right-wing no-regulation

As I read the Jesse Wall story (http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2003/07/war_of_the_jess.html), this is just about a lot of cry-babies who want the rules to only apply to other people. What is so hard to understand about "everything allowed"?

And because a lot of those cry-babies got their fragile little feelings hurt, Lindens' folded and said "well, now the rules don't allow anything by anybody".

Second Life should have just kept the region as free-for-all and let people fight it out if they want to; better there th

To be fair, two things are true. One, Second Life has a woefully steep learning curve. Two, it's hard to find the things you'd really want to find in Second Life. Two is connected to One.... There are lots of people doing lots of creative and interesting things in Second Life, but it takes a fair bit of experience, or somebody leading you around, to know how to find them.

The writer of this sloppy piece did a quick dash and look, almost willfully avoiding putting in the most minimal effort it would take to really find out what's there. It would be like somebody "trying to figure out what this web thing is all about" by starting at http://www.com/ [www.com] without knowing about sites like Google. Again, yes, the web is more mature and as such it's far easier to find what you're looking for... but that is how distorted the picture this article paints is.

Yes, the sorts of things you're interested in will often not be easily or readily found. But once you start figuring out how to find them, there's all kinds of great stuff going on.

One of the things I though that second life SHOULD have become but never did.... The fricking internet interface in a Avatar interface. There is no Google island where I can search Second life for something and zip there. 99% of Second life is just a timewaster you cant do anything in there. Even when Ira Flato did his Science Friday shows in Second life it was a joke. Oh boy, I can either listen on my pc and easily twitter my questions, or I can sit there in a difficult to use UI and act like I am listening... no thanks.

One of the cool things about the web is that it's easy to find things you're interested in. Second Life is just an incompetent, anthropomorphic version of the web, where it's hard to find stuff. It's hard to find things I'm interested in when I'm in meatspace, without the benefit of the internet. If Linden Labs were competent they would have found a way to make a second life that's easier and more convenient than the first one. Instead, they made a world where you have to make buildings oversized because ot

He "lived inside SL" for a week, albeit three years ago. You can hardly call that a quick dash and look.

Ask any fan of any outdated MMO about the game they've put so much time and effort into and they will tell you it's the best thing in the world. Point out to them the MMO's faults and they will will quickly dismiss it. Tell them that the world is empty and they will say they are surrounded by friends and players. What they often fail to see is that, for them, all of that is true. For a noob, it isn't.

Linden labs shut down gambling, segregated all porn to its own island, and now 2nd life's "wholesome areas" are now ghost towns because everyone's hanging out in porn island and spending their money there for virtual kinkiness. Also, writer speculates that most of 2nd life's revenue is now from porn island.

Second Life was immensely popular with people from all walks of life. They could visit and become who and what they wanted. It was a jointly held fantasy. Want to be a bipedal tiger or cat? No problem. Want to have sex with anyone and anything? No problem. Want to go to a club with strippers and play the slots? No problem.

People went to Second Life to have a second life, to be free of all the rules and social restrictions that made their first life so mundane.

In forcing their laws onto the onto the Lindens, real-life governments effectively sent everyone back home to Kansas. After all, if you must follow the same rules as in real life, why bother with a second version of the same dull thing?

Er, it's not dead by any means yet. In fact load seems to be climbing still, just slower than it used to.

And you can still be a bipedal cat, have sex with anything, or go to a club with strippers. There a few more rules in place than there were some years ago, but none of what you mentioned except gambling went anywhere.

Now the thing about playing the slots is unfortunate US stupidity, but that's not SL's fault.

Second Life was immensely popular with people from all walks of life. They could visit and become who and what they wanted. It was a jointly held fantasy.

There was unique quality of SL that attracted people who wanted to create a new reality. For those who wanted a cool 3D chat program, it probably has lost some of the appeal.

I noticed my oldest daughter likes to chat with people on IMVU. This environment seems to have as much rich avatar capability--clothes, body styles, create your own rooms, etc.-- but is definitely at the core a chat room. She can jump between different rooms quickly and play RP scenarios without any "MMO" trappings.

For me, I can tell you what happened to Second Life. They screwed up my account and their customer service is useless.

Long version: I had an OLD account that received the 500 L$ weekly allowance that used to be given to every account. Then they changed it so that new accounts don't get that allowance. I went on, made a few custom objects and was happen with my character... Until they got hacked. When they get hacked, they force everyone to change their passwords using the password retrieval system. No problem, it's an email that gives you a link. Everything was fine... And then they got hacked again. This time, my password link doesn't work... It just says there was 'an error'. After trying like 5 times over a couple days, I call them. Their machine hangs up on me without ANY voice prompt. Over the next 6 months to a year, I called over and over, but each time it hung up on me, or answered then hung up, or answered and told me to leave a message then told me the mailbox was full... One time it DID let me leave a message and their message promised me they'd contact me... Nothing. So I eventually just gave up. It's not worth the hassle, and I'm NOT going to make a new account and lose my allowance and the customizations to my character.

I've been told that the customer service is better now, but I no longer care.

Basically, the 5 page story ends up concluding that Second Life is for porn. Gosh, who could have guessed?

The simple fact is that SL was a hype based on the ancient idea of virtual/3d environments being useful. They ain't.

The reason? It is to bloody hard to do anything. When I am in the real world, moving about, turning my head, manipulating objects and chewing gum is so easy I don't actually know how to do it, I just do it. In second life, even just walking about is a pain in the ass. FPS solve this by simplifying the world and giving you limited interaction. You can just jump up any wall rather then having to climb it or put a chair in place to use as a ladder etc etc. In Dragon Age Origins I just click on a cocoon a few meters above me, without having to climb the tree it is hanging from. But in a virtual world ala Second Life they remove this simplified game element because they want something more.

And in the end, they end up with something less. Maybe it is the uncanny valley, the more real a virtual meeting room becomes, the more obvious it becomes that it isn't real. This doesn't matter in a game, because a game isn't real. But a meeting with real people I work with in a virtual world will just feel off. Because nobody but the most dedicated attendee will bother to fully animate his avatar. Smiling, body posture, they will all be pre-scripted (and what kind of person who needs to attend a virtual meeting hasthe time to sculpt his own avatar?) and not like the real person. And for what? So you can talk more easily? You are still staring at a screen, why not use video conferincing? You can interact with a 3D object? Only if that 3D object is fully realized in SL. And I can also see that 3D object in any other display where I can spin the camera and not have to manipulate a camera around a character with collision detection. There are far better purpose build tools for showing a 3D object. And where you new 3D design is NOT on someone elses server.

Oh, there are some useful scenario's, but they are so limited that SL doesn't deserve the hype. It would be like creating a hype for the Excell sheet viewer that MS has for people without Excell.

And so, as the story shows, porn is the only activity that is worthwhile. Same as the net. Just how much information do you need in a day? But you can always use more porn.

I find it intresting to see that the author says the hype has shifted to facebook and twitter. Indeed. Any predictions for how these will fair in 3 years time? MySpace has dropped a lot of its hype. Countless commercial blogs show current post as being several years old...

Part of it all I think is the problem CNN has. They don't have enough news to fill 24 hours and I think the web as a whole might not actually have enough content to fill it all. Twitter is the most obvious example of this, so I will use facebook. Intresting to keep track of old friends... BUT how much can you track? Say that you follow all your friends holiday pictures. Unless you got hundreds of friends, that will hardly keep you that busy will it? There simply ain't enough things people can put online to keep social sites full. Except of course porn. How much of MySpace/Facebook is naughty pics?

The problem is nothing new, it takes pixar 2 years to create a movie that takes us 2 hours to watch. Bioware spends a month on each hour of gameplay. A free news rag like metro is a day job for a whole office of workers and a global news network, and I am done with it in 20 minutes.

I can spend ages setting up a beautifull display in Second Life, as some have done, and then a user goes, he sees it and that is it... done. That is why porn rules, because it is so very very cheap to make and people will pay for a very similar girl in a very similar pose over and over again. Porn is an amazing business. Only the food industry matches it in being able to get people to pay for exactly the same stuff again and again.

Part of it all I think is the problem CNN has. They don't have enough
news to fill 24 hours and I think the web as a whole might not actually have enough
content to fill it all.

It's funny, but I can spend all day reading different news sites, covering different
countries or disciplines (science/finance/funny_pictures_of_cats today) and yet CNN
can't seem to produce more than about 43 minutes of bad summaries of (mostly 1st-)
world events. There's NEWS aplenty, but they don't seem to care about sharing the

That content, that took you X hours to setup is interesting to how many people? If your entire class is interested, 20 or so? Lets say it results in a hundred visits, and then it done. They either think it was funny and will revisit for a while to see if there is something new or think it sucked and never visit again.

Same with Second Life. LOTS of people visited, even spend a few dollars, then they noticed you can only see so many 3d willies and never came back. Just not enough content to keep people hooke

Probably the most practical (non-sex) application of 2nd Life is its capacity for distance learning/education. Holding online courses in a virtual world... beats the hell out of the buggy web applet i was using back in the glory days of nortel.

There is ZERO worth for 2nd life distance learning. Having content available on the site for the students, videoconferenceing and teleconferencing is 90000% more effective than doing a animated barbie doll classroom on the screen.

This is so much more effective it's why ALL schools use it instead of second life and it's horribly clunky interface with a steep learning curve. Even a non educated computer user can easily learn from a webcam enabled laptop with a videoconference flash link.

not sure where you get your info, but not ALL schools exclude second life from DE. You'd probably be surprised how many actually have campuses in second life and pay big bucks for researching/developing SL as a platform. I'm not going to argue the effectiveness of it (and I'm certainly not going to defend it, either), but I will say this much: Bell's first phone looked nothing like an iPhone. Just like 2nd life looks nothing like the Matrix.

The problem with videoconferencing is that you see half of the audience only through the tiny "keyhole" of the video screen. In a public seminar talk, it's distracting and confusing for the speaker and the part of the audience that is physically present. I've been at seminar talks involving videoconferencing, and I've been in SL seminar talks, and I found the latter a much better, more consistent experience.

There must be hundreds of apps for distance learning, some of them with dedicated interfaces, video / audio chat, file exchange, presentation, white boarding. About the only SL brings to the table is chat. I doubt is any use at all for the other things.

SL has some impressive tech, running a user-scriptable 3D world with user generated content. The idea was great, tried it for a while...

But the problem was that the server grid doesn't have enough power to allow a realistic amount of people anywhere. Whenever I was somewhere with over ten people things started lagging bad. So what you end up with are (often beautiful and extravagant) ghost towns. The concept of an open world seems like a great idea, but in practice a lot of areas are off limits due to security measures. And with little communal planning every server is more or less it's own little island.

I still love the concept, but like communism, a working implementation seems to elude us still.

Here some students from Delaware, USA designed and built virtual homes for the townships around Cape Town. The designs were critiqued by an organization that handles this stuff in Cape Town in real-life. The students got some valuable experience. For example, designing a house with multiple bathrooms. Ah, no. Or using materials not readily available in South Africa.

I can see with time and technological advances that students won't have to truck into their local university, they'll be able to learn within virtual classrooms.

I think it's the get-off-my-lawn luddism applied to old school Internet users. Anything to do with blogs or social networking gets the same treatment.

Only three stories earlier to this one, do we have an Eve Online story, with none of these criticisms. Of course, it's fair to say that a game is more fun than something that isn't a game, but the SL criticisms aren't about that. The "get a first life" style comments would apply to any online environment, be it IRC, Eve Online, or indeed amusingly, posting on

I had a gander in there a month or so back, seems pretty much the same to me (but much bigger).

The article asks "why it’s raking in more cash than ever before" - erm, this must be some new meaning of the phrase "went wrong" that I wasn't previously aware of!

The issue perhaps is that it's highly commercial now and there's a LOT of competition, and also there has been insane expansion during the land boom. So whilst you're probably the only one browsing a shop, there are loads and loads and loads of them. But whilst you have to look on the map for the green dots to see where the actual people are, there are still tens of thousands of them! They're not exactly difficult to find!

The biggest problem it has, is that it's become *too* full and 99.9% of it is crap. So you try to find an interesting event and all you see are pages and pages of yard sales and "money chair" non-events, and so it's a lot more effort trying to find someone or something that isn't about selling you stuff. But 'quiet' or 'empty' are certainly not words I'd used to describe that place. It's just not a media fad any more, but the population itself is right where it's always been.

I concur, been on for most of a year, and while most of it is empty, there are areas of constant activity. I think a lot of the marketing tie ins are empty because they are like a commercial, they are all fancy and such but after a few minutes its all just the same from then on. Like a good web portal you have to maintain it to keep interest.

If the author had looked for an interest topic and searched around for related sims he'd probably end up on one that is active.

My sister is a home care nurse and last week she had to visit a patient who just had some surgery. The patient's 40-50 year old son lived in the same house to take care of his mom. While my sister was trying to take care of the patient, the guy kept asking if she used computers much.. then he kept talking about how he is always playing Second Life. Then he told my sister that she should try it out and look him up in game...

I figure the guy was probably just an extreme introvert, though it really cree

I would love to use it to prototype architectural stuff. However, the engine is pretty old and not really compatible with models you could build in Blender or other 3D editor software. You need to do a lot of stuff in the SL editor itself, which is pretty nice, but I don't really want my creations locked away in their proprietary format. I've been looking at using the UnReal engine or the Valve Source engine instead (though I'll probably just end up

That's because it isn't a game - it's a simulation. The point, like in most non-directed play, is to make your own fun. I'm doing it by programming in LSL (SL's development language - reminds me of really early PERL), seeing other people's kewl stuff and making friends. I've even got a boyfriend. He knows perfectly well that I'm not "real", but as it stands he doesn't have a hope in hell of getting a real girlfriend (yes, I'm using f

For a few ideas of what might be in store from virtual worlds like Second Life in the future check out a trailer made for the "Federal Consortium of Virtual Worlds." This group has over a thousand members from government, the private sector, and educational institutions.

extension or replacement - if t here are people for which 2L is their 1L that is fine too - I still prefer documentaries in my cellar but I can understand there are people that enjoy virtual sex in 2Las well as enjoying rubbing their real selves against other equally real bodies and even exchanging body fluids or do whatever they prefer to do. The point is looking from aside any of these three alternatives may be perceived as disturbing and I am sure there are places where majority of such activities are il

Ah yes, let's list transgender people alongside failing at life. Perhaps the point of Slashdot is for people like you who want to throw insults, when you'd be too scared to do so in the real world, right?

I don't know what the point of Second Life is either, but the obvious comparison is to things like IRC. People make the same tired cliched criticisms of IRC as you did of SL, but I'd hope that generally any geek on Slashdot didn't fall for that.

It can also be an escape from RL for the disabled. I know several disabled individuals that play SL on a regular basis. For them it makes real life a little easier to cope with knowing they have someplace they can go to where they aren't limited by their disabilities.

What's wrong with wanting to be something else than what you are for a while?

When I go to Second Life, I can be whatever I want to be, unlimited by physical restrictions (although SL imposes its own restrictions, of course). But that's not because I'm unhappy with what I actually am; it's simply because sometimes, it's fun to enter a fantasy.

Seriously, how is it different from playing other computer games, or watching movies, or reading books, especially science-fiction and fantasy?

The answer, of course, is that it isn't, and that doing the things you like, because you like them, without being constantly afraid of how others will view you and your actions is a good thing. People who do that and who always think about how others might perceive them with everything they do... well, I pity people like that.

Of course SL can be overdone, just like anything else, and those people who spend 14 hours per day there (if they actually exist) are overdoing it. But then, so are those surfing the Internet (perhaps reading Slashdot?) 14 hours a day, for instance; the problem isn't with the hobby but rather with overdoing it.

One MIGHT argue that Linden Labs actually has a vested interest in sucking people in and making them spend as much as possible of their life on SL, but I'm not sure if that's the case, and in any case, it's up to the user anyway.

Caveat gamer. YOU are in charge of your own life, as an adult, noone else, so if you overdo it, you have noone but yourself to blame. However, this also means that if you don't overdo things, there's nothing wrong with them. It's two sides of the same coin really.

Ah, geez. Give us a break from your superior, "look at what a life I have, not like those SL losers!' crap. You know who says things like that? People with no life. Seriously, have you ever considered that maybe, just maybe, different people like different things? Or, maybe people DO try out new social strategies in SL, build up their confidence, and then go back to the real world with the courage to be a slut.

I'm sorry that I have to give you such a hard time about this, but you, sir, are discouraging sluts, and this, I will not tolerate.

I tried second life as well, and discovered the same thing. However I think the slowness was because it was still downloading all of its crap. I'm pretty sure that second life actually brings new meaning to the word 'bloat'

Then I tried to bring my class of high school aged kids into Second Life to go on a virtual field trip to these places... only to be thwarted by Linden Labs policy of not allowing more than five people to log into the world from the same location.

1. High school aged kids shouldn't be in Second Life. It's an 18+ world.

2. There is no such limit. There are people who have hundreds of bots logged in from the same location.

^ The article you give uses one-off items (ie. sales of books and records). You can only buy a book once, but you can tweet hundreds of times a day if you want. I do not think you can relate "patterns" between the sales of books and number of users using social media sites.